By full, I take it they mean of the chest infection, not that they're experimenting with stem cell therapy to replace the motor neurons in his brain and spinal cord. (Though if they got to that point before he was too old to operate on, it might be kinda cool.)

The man is a survivor, that is for sure. I saw him lecture a few months ago, and is still on form. He will still answer the dumbest questions from any snide creationist or just plain ignorant member of the public - even though it took him considerable effort to compose a response.

How long does it take him now? I attended a lecture probably a decade ago at CalTech, and he took questions but was able to answer only one or two in the 45 minutes that followed. I've heard that the technology for his communications has been improved, but not to what degree.

Well one of the questions was 'IF the universe is expanding, where is it expanding from' and the other was 'What happened before the big bang' (I paraphrase in both cases).

Both had a tone in their voice suggesting they had some uber-clever question with which to catch out probably the greatest living British mind, and both asked questions that could've been answered by myself or any of the about 50 people from the physics department who attended the lecture. It angered me, I must say.

I don't know... I always thought "what happened before the Big Bang" is a good question. I am still expecting a convincing answer.

I have heard that there was no time "before the Big Bang" because timespace is a single thing, but that only makes me wonder what triggered time or how matter could exist outside space, since there was no time.

Then, I get an explanation about how particles appear and disapear, coming and going from "somewhere else" (sorry, I don't remember the right term) without an apparent reas

The common answer by scientists is quite unconvincing, and what it really amounts to is "sorry, can't explain it, the equations don't go back any further". A year or two ago I saw a Hawking video (covered on Slashdot) where he actually addressed this question as part of the presentation, and he gave the answer as a joke along the lines that God created Hell for people who asked such questions.

Yeah, most of them really ARE that dumb. There's a few who are fairly well educated but they have to take a lot of effort to make the world around us fit into a 2000 year-old fairy tale and still be plausible.

Call me small-minded. Call me a bigot. I don't care, as far as I'm concerned they are a plague that's long outlived their usefulness.

Well, this individual story might not tell us much but there's a lot of evidence that creationists are in general dumber and less educated than the general populace. (This is assuming that we define creationist to not mean "belief that God created the world" but rather almost any statement that makes more or less concrete claims about the role that God had in the universe). The GSS data is very strong in this regard, showing that there's a strong correlation between having a large vocabulary (which is a us

You do realize that there are snide believers in evolution, also...right? Just being a creationist doesn't make someone "snide".

The GP was using an adjective to modify the noun in the sentence- 'creationist.' If every creationist were snide, he wouldn't have used the adjective because it would have been redundant. He chose to call the creationists in this scenario 'snide' because they were asking rudimentary questions to a man for whom communication is a great chore.

You do realize that there are snide believers in evolution, also...right?

So? If there weren't snide evolutionists asking questions at the event on which the description was based, the fact that they exist elsewhere is irrelevant. The use of a adjective along with a noun usually suggests that the adjective is adding additional information that is not implicit in the noun, and also usually does not mean that there are no instances where the same adjective would apply to other nouns, even ones that are semantically opposed to the one being used in the present sentence.

Just being a creationist doesn't make someone "snide".

If it did, the phrase "snide creationist" would be redundant, so the mere use of the phrase suggests, indeed, that the GP realizes that.

Not looking for an argument, by any means...just pointing that out.

...in a context in which it is completely irrelevant. If you aren't trolling, exactly what are you doing?

No, it isn't. There's nothing miraculous about a low probability occurrence. Given a large enough sample, low probability results are likely and expected; the absence of someone with unusual survival would be much more significant.

Maybe the anti-Hawking is merely employing the newly-discovered form of tunneling, as discussed in a prior article. We need to establish a Casimir Effect such as to exclude the anti-Hawking particle from being a valid state. Do you think if we made him a tinfoil hat, it would work?

First we hear that he's near death, now he's going to recover... it's almost as if he got trapped in a black hole, and was only able to escape by spawning an anti-Hawking to be left inside... yes, that's the only thing that makes sense.

Comfortable and expecting to make a full recovery --- As comfortable as a dying man can be I'm sure. Makes me wonder why he'd even want to recover. What amazes me most is his strong will to live - going from being a graduate student with a prognoses of months to live to living years and beating major odds.
My thoughts are with you Mr. Hawking - here's to a speedy recovery.

Comfortable and expecting to make a full recovery --- As comfortable as a dying man can be I'm sure. Makes me wonder why he'd even want to recover.

First thing - we're all dying. Right now. Sure, Mr. Hawking has a name for what he's dying from and you don't (yet), but mortality is pretty much a constant. Just because your fate hasn't been given a label yet doesn't mean you don't have one. You do, just like everyone else. Including Mr. Hawking. I hope you're "as comfortable" as you can be too.

Second thing. Any sick person wants to recover. And that means you too. I guarantee if you were in a similar state you'd want to live just as much as...well, as anyone else. There's more to life than being able to walk around the block. There's art, music, science, math, and a host of other things you don't need a functioning body to enjoy.

My best friend from college has crippling MS. He's wheelchair bound. And he's one of the craziest and most fun people I've ever known. And at the time had an astonishingly hot girlfriend.

First thing. The label you're looking for is "senescence." Not everyone has it. It only occurs in older people. It will develop in everyone, but the key processes involved in aging do not happen in the young. So, no. Not everyone is dying of something right now.

Second thing. You're so remarkably far away from reality that I'm just going to leave you with two words that you can google at your own leisure. Euthanasia. Suicide.

Obviously Dr. Hawking will recover - he has not yet found a full Grand Unified Theory integrating quantum mechanics and gravity. That's the deal he made with Death - he gets to have that theory published before he dies.

A much better gambit than challenging The Grim Reaper to chess. Or Twister, even.

I am very glad to hear that he is recovering from the immediate health concerns. Despite his age combined with his Lou Gehrig's disease, he potentially has so much more to offer the scientific world specifically and humanity in general. His mind is clear and simply, utterly amazing.

It should be said that through his book, A Brief History of Time, that he has encourage many people otherwise ignorant of science to not only better understand our universe but to do so with enjoyment and sometimes passion. It

I sometimes worry about his quality of life. I have read several of his books. According to the latest one I read, given his longevity, he is not sure he has Lou Gehrig's disease or if it is a similar but not as quickly fatal disorder. He reports he has now lost the ability to judge distances. Hopefully, the disorder will not affect his higher faculties.